They live among us

But our default reaction to them is hand to chappal, and chappal to insect

My cousin is angry. They have taken away the bowl of water she keeps outside the building for stray dogs to drink out of, under the pretext that it breeds mosquitoes.

“What about the two garbage cans right there — do those not breed mosquitoes?” she demands angrily at a society meeting. She is told, “Garbage cans will not bite our building members.” “And neither will the mosquitoes apparently,” she mutters under her breath. The dogs have stopped getting clean water. Now they drink stagnant rainwater from the potholes where mosquitoes breed.

On my way to work, i share a rickshaw with a cockroach. It was sitting on the shelf below the driver`s handle and i think it noticed me staring. It stopped and turned to me, his feelers still rocking in violent rhythm to the bumps on Mumbai roads. The rickshaw driver was not aware of it at all. So i indulged in what i would like to believe was a dangerous stare-off with this cockroach (but i was not wearing my glasses so it would qualify for a squint-off). I felt resentful that it was riding all the way from one end of the city to the other without sharing the cost for this expensive rickshaw ride. I imagined it smirked at me and then exited from the hole in the metal near the head lamp and probably rode the rest of the journey belly down on the lamp with the wind in his feelers.

Every time the house help does not appear for more than three days, squiggly thin lines of ants find their way to my dad’s study desk. They crowd at the base of pen stands and in the pages of books. They pour down in thousands, little tiny red or black or brown dots travelling at breakneck speeds towards something as impractical as a ball pen. Silly ants, ball pen ink is not tasty or nutritious, but every time it happens i cannot stop staring at their wasted effort. They don’t even realise that just two rooms away is my kitchen with a bountiful feast of fruits on the dining table and ketchup bottles on shelves.

The fish market near my house is ruled by four cats, all of whom are called a variant of the word ‘Maushi’, which means mother’s sister in Marathi. I don’t know what it is about cats that makes people want to make them our relatives. These four cats, as cats are wont to, could not care less about our ‘relationship’ with them, as long as there’re scraps of fish involved.

Ahmad Sharif, a rickshaw driver once told me about monsoon nights where as soon as it starts to rain, the strays on the road jump in to curl up on the back seat. If it gets cold they sometimes dig into the seats ripping up clumps of coir, cotton and exposing the wooden seat frames to snuggle in further. He sighs, “It costs me Rs 300 to fix it every single time but it’s not like they’ll stop feeling cold if i tell them it costs me Rs 300, right?”

Despite Disney’s and Pixar’s attempts to make insects cute (with movies about rats cooking and ants spewing little allegories of life) the default reaction to sharing our world with these creatures is hand to chappal, and chappal to insect. Gone are the days of rolled up newspapers because technology has brought us mosquito rackets — which are unfortunately not tiny rackets used by mosquitoes to play mosquito tennis. We’re squished and swatted and screamed down houses because they suddenly make themselves known to us by scuttling across the room. We spray and apply dangerous medicines that could damage our bodies because we want them dead.